Kate Middleton is days away from giving birth, and it seems as though half the western world (or at least 98% of British and American celebrity magazines) is waiting with bated breath. Where is the princess now? (Kensington Palace.) What is her birth plan? (Natural, if possible.) How is she staying fit during her pregnancy? (Brisk walks, prenatal yoga.)

Having a baby is a joyous occasion and the Duchess of Cambridge is a beloved celebrity and modern-day royal princess, so, of course, we're collectively fascinated by the impending birth. But our cultural obsession with pregnancy obscures a darker reality: that fetishizing motherhood often means actual mothers don't get the support and the healthcare they need.

Middleton is giving birth in the UK, where maternal mortality rates are about half of what they are in the United States. On this side of the pond, maternal mortality is on par with countries like Macedonia. And unlike most of the world, where rates of women dying in childbirth have gone down, in the United States our maternal mortality numbers have gone up since 1990. There are counties in the US where maternal mortality rates rival those of Sierra Leone, which has some of the highest rates of maternal deaths in the world.

Despite our dismal health outcomes, there's precious little focus on the reality that many pregnant women face. Americans are nearly as Middleton-obsessed as our British pals and, arguably, more baby-crazed in general. Our celebrity magazines feature a smorgasbord of bump-watches and post-pregnancy weight loss success stories. The traditional baby shower has morphed into a series of events, including a shower, a gender-reveal party, a naming party, increasingly elaborate birthday and half-birthday parties, and surely others of which I am unaware.

Facebook is such a treasure trove of over-sharing parenting updates that there are entire blogs and books dedicated to documenting the worst offenders. Politicians boast about their "pro-family" credentials. Male CEOs and political leaders like to claim that their wives have "the hardest job in the world". Pinterest and other female-centric websites are full of gauzy photos of white-clad new mamas and design pictures of stylish nurseries.

A new baby is, of course, cause for celebration. But while we're gazing at glossy baby pics and trying to determine whether a female celebrity's protruding belly means she's with child or just ate a burger for lunch, women whose pregnancies don't make the magazines are too often finding themselves injured, sick, financially devastated, or even dead. And all the focus on glowing mamas and "the hardest job in the world" makes it easier to present parenthood – by which we usually mean motherhood – as a glorious, universally desirable and fundamentally individual task that should be incredibly difficult but look easy.

What if, instead, we saw parenthood a bit more realistically: as something that most people do and that's necessary to continue the human race; as a thing that is fundamentally difficult and deserving of strong social support; and also as something that shouldn't be an assumption or a cultural marker of adulthood.

The United States is the most expensive country in the world in which to have a baby. Even with insurance, you could be looking at a $40,000 bill – chump change for a princess, perhaps, but 80% of the median American household income. Yet, as already noted, babies and mothers die here at astounding rates, far higher than in economically comparable nations.

Pregnancy on television and in magazines is imaged as a planned, two-parent, upper-middle-class deal. In reality, more women are having babies without partners than ever before. Despite the Murphy Brown media representations where high-flying career gals decide to go at parenthood alone, single moms are much more likely to be younger, poorer and less educated than their married peers. But contrary to rightwing narratives, young single mothers aren't poor and less educated because they had children young; often, they had children young because they're poor and their career and social mobility prospects were low, making early childbirth seem like a rational choice.

Since young mothers tend to be less wealthy, less educated and less likely to be insured, they lack access to basics like comprehensive prenatal care and solid nutrition. They also face a slew of daily stress factors, including poverty, racism, social stigma and demanding or soul-deadening work, without sick days or paid leave and never for enough money. As a result, their birth outcomes are often worse, with teen and low-income mothers having higher rates of underweight and premature births.

Women and girls need tools at their disposal to prevent pregnancies they don't want, as well as financial, social and medical support to make sure that they are healthy before, during and after pregnancy (if they choose to become pregnant at all). But American girls and women (and boys and men) also need a reason to delay childbearing.

We need to see a realistic prospect of social mobility. We need access to a solid education that will adequately prepare us for jobs that are both available and pay fairly. We need workplace rules that are humane, and include basic things like paid sick days, paid parental leave and paid vacation days. We need male partners who will step up to the plate and prioritize taking an active role in their children's lives, whether or not they're married to the mother.

American society is increasingly divided along the mommy fault line, with wealthier, whiter, more educated women tending to delay marriage and childbirth and reaping a series of social and economic benefits, while lower-income, less educated younger women are responding to their circumstances and having children earlier and often outside of marriage. Yet, both groups are forced to shoehorn their reality into an economy and a political system seemingly designed for the 1950s nuclear family.

While we have an entire political party that bills itself as "pro-family", that same party staunchly refuses to support legislation that actually helps modern families, going so far as to try to end the food stamp program this week. Republicans routinely use many family arrangements as examples of bad choices or moral decay, railing against same-sex marriage, single mothers and teen moms. While young low-income mothers of color are imaged as the most immoral and least responsible, women who wait to have children so they can pursue education or careers are also on the hook: they're ostensibly using birth control, having sex for pleasure and selfishly putting themselves ahead of their reproductive duties.

That political hostility, coupled with a rosy pop culture picture of motherhood, makes it awfully difficult to successfully advocate for social support of parents and families. Parenthood – motherhood – is a cultural given, something it's assumed that nearly all women aspire to. Some women opt out by choice and some by default, but many others become parents because that's simply what you do, and you're not a "real" family or a fully-realized woman unless you have kids.

The idealized mom is Sarah Palin's Mama Bear, ready to sacrifice everything for her kids, starting with her physical health and extending to her finances, her relationships and her career. She's the one whose job is "the hardest in the world" but also the most rewarding – so hard and so rewarding that there's no need to create social mechanisms to help her out, let alone compensate her. So hard and rewarding that women who haven't done it can't possibly understand how myopic and limited their own lives are. And so hard and rewarding that most men wouldn't even consider doing it, even if they're happy to condescendingly claim that their lovely wife actually runs the show.

Women who don't meet the mothering ideal – women whose most important and demanding job is their paying one, women who don't have husbands, women who can't sacrifice everything because there is no "everything" to sacrifice – are invisible in the cultural discourse and vilified in the political one. And so, our social policies are set to serve the mythical perfect mother, leaving real, flawed, complicated families to fend for themselves and cobble together individual solutions to broad cultural and political problems.

We love the bump-watches and the ridiculous celebrity baby names and the stories about the impending royal child because we're human beings, and we'd be in a bad place as a species if most of us weren't at least a little predisposed to getting excited about the entry of a new human into the world. While it's easy (and good!) to get misty over a creature with such tiny toes and such a big future, it's more difficult to show real support for the many imperfect people actually caring for the infants who don't appear on magazine covers. Meeting that challenge is part of what takes us from being nominally responsive animals to being caring, responsible human beings.

Babies are adorable, and it's awfully hard to look at one and not contemplate her total innocence and the endless possibilities she faces. Those possibilities shouldn't narrow dramatically as soon as she's old enough to have a baby of her own.